Satya Nadella becomes a rage in cyber world

Microsoft Corp named Satya Nadella as its next chief executive officer, ending a longer-than-expected search for a new leader after Steve Ballmer announced his intention to retire in August. (Reuters/Microsoft/Handout)

Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella swept the cyber world today with nearly half-a-billion search results thrown up even as he became toast of the social networking sites abuzz with news of him being named as Microsoft CEO.

Search words 'Satya Nadella' in Google search box produced over 440 million results in half a second. Google news propped up 12.8 million news articles featuring the 46-year-old in just 0.14 second. Right now, it appears he is only third after the US President Barack Obama, who attracted about 650 million results and Bill Gates (about 480 million), in the virtual world.

While Indian business icon Ratan Tata fetched nearly four million results, Indian-American Indra Nooyi, chairperson and CEO of PepsiCo, had less than one million search results on Google.

Principal of Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet Col R S Khatri said that he had mentioned, in his speech during the old students' reunion in 2011 in which Nadella was also present, that Google produced 1.14 lakh entries in just 0.13 seconds when Satya Nadela's name was typed.

"Reacting to my remarks, Nadella had said that he would tell his people at Bing (microsoft search engine) that they should do it a shade better," Khatri told PTI.

A page opened just a few hours ago in the name of Nadella on Facebook saw over 30,000 likes in the afternoon and was flooded with wishes for his role as CEO.

In a reply to Sreeramulu Alapati, his classmate from MIT Manipal, Nadella answered: "I marvel every day at how people can excel - and that's what really gets me going."

Microsoft's official blog said on Tuesday morning, the Studio D building at Microsoft resembled a mini-version of Seattle's Century Link Field, as hundreds of Microsoft employees swarmed around a small stage and craned their necks over three floors of balconies and stairwells, raising voices and clapping hands to welcome the company's third CEO, Satya Nadella and to honour the previous two CEOs, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.